ADVOCACY

What is Effective Advocacy?

An effective advocate is a storyteller who grabs the audience by the throat in the first 11 seconds and never lets go with a narrative that coheres and counters the opposing side's version of events. The successful lawyer conveys the humanity and pathos of the client without condescension or appropriation.

Lawyers from the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent celebrating the exoneration of Kash Delano Register.

That is the advocate I have always strived to be. It is the advocate I teach my students to become at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where we represent indigent clients charged with misdemeanor offenses, represent prisoners in youthful offender parole hearings, and advocate more broadly for racial justice by taking on longer-term impact projects.

Last October, after 15 months of litigation, we got a dismissal for a client who we don't believe ever should have been charged in the first place.

I teach my students how to be trial lawyers--skills I learned during my seven years as a federal public defender. I brought those skills to the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, which I directed from 2012-2015. In 2013, the Project freed Kash Delano Register (pictured at left), who spent 34 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. To read more about Kash Register's case, click on the articles posted below.

Without DNA evidence, how could we challenge the eyewitness testimony that sent our client to prison for 34 years?DEC 17TH 2013

Lara Bazelon is a law professor, author, and contributing writer for Slate. Her op-eds and essays have also been published in the New York Times,Washington Post, and Politico, among other media outlets. Her book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, will be published in the fall of 2018.